The Queen's Fool Read online

  One evening in early May she announced her intention of spending the whole night in prayer and sent me and all her ladies away. I was glad to be excused from yet another long silent evening when we sewed by the fireside and tried not to notice when the queen’s tears drenched the linen shirt that she was stitching for the king.

  I was walking briskly to the chamber that I shared with three of the other maids when I saw a shadow by a doorway in the gallery. I did not hesitate, I would never pause for someone waiting to speak to me, and he had to fall into step beside me and keep to my rapid pace.

  “You must come with me, Hannah Verde,” he said.

  Even at the sound of my full name I did not pause.

  “I only obey the queen.”

  Like a slow flag unfurling he held before me a rolled scroll and dropped one end to let it fall open. Almost despite myself I felt my feet slow and stop. I saw the seals at the bottom and my name at the top, Hannah Verde, alias Hannah Green, alias Hannah the Fool.

  “What is this?” I asked, though I knew.

  “A warrant,” he said.

  “A warrant for what?” I asked, though I knew.

  “For your arrest, for heresy,” he said.

  “Heresy?” I breathed, as if I had never heard the word before, as if I had not been waiting for this moment every day since they had taken my mother.

  “Yes, maid, heresy,” he said.

  “I will see the queen about this.” I half turned back to run to her.

  “You will come with me,” he said and took my arm and waist in a grip which I could not have fought even if my strength had not been bleeding away in my terror.

  “The queen will intercede for me!” I whimpered, hearing my voice as weak as a child’s.

  “This is a royal warrant,” he said simply. “You are to be arrested for questioning and she has given her authority.”

  They took me to St. Paul’s in the city and they kept me overnight in a prison room with a woman who had been racked so badly that she lay like a rag doll in the corner of the cell, her arm bones and leg bones broken, her spine disjointed, her feet pointing outward like the hands of a clock showing a quarter to three. From her bloodied lips came a moan like the sigh of the wind. All night she breathed out her pain like a breeze in springtime. With us also was a woman whose nails had been pulled from her fingers. She nursed her broken hands in her lap and did not look up when they turned the key in the door and thrust me inside. She had her mouth pursed in a funny little grimace, then I realized they had cut out her tongue as well.

  I hunkered down like a beggar on the threshold, my back to the door. They said nothing to me: the broken moaner and the dumb one without fingernails. In my terror, I said nothing to them. I watched the moonlight stroll across the floor, illuminating first the woman whose body was twisted like a dolly, and then shining on the fingers of the woman who cupped her hands in her lap and pursed her lips. In the silver light her fingertips looked as black as nibs dipped in printers’ ink.

  The night passed in the end, though I thought that it would last forever.

  In the morning the door swung open and neither woman raised her head. The stillness of the racked woman made her look as if she were dead, perhaps she was. “Hannah Verde,” the voice outside said.

  I tried to rise to my feet in obedience but my legs buckled beneath me from sheer terror. I knew that I could not have my fingernails torn out without screaming for mercy, telling everything I knew. I could not be tied to the rack without betraying my lord, Elizabeth, John Dee, every name I had ever heard whispered, names that had never even been mentioned. Since I could not even stand on my own two feet when they summoned me, how would I ever defy them?

  The guard scooped me up in his arms, dragged me along, my feet scrabbling like a drunkard’s on the stones behind us. He stank of ale, and a worse smell, smoke and burning fat which clung to his woolen cape. I realized that the smell was from the fires, the smoke from the kindling and the brands, the fat from the bubbling skin of dying men and women. As the realization came to me I felt my stomach rebel and I choked on vomit.

  “Here, watch out!” he said irritably, and thrust my head away from him so he banged my face against the stone wall.

  He dragged me up some steps, and then across a courtyard.

  “Where?” I said faintly.

  “Bishop Bonner,” he said shortly. “God help you.”

  “Amen,” I said promptly, as if accurate observation now would save me. “Dear God, Amen.”

  I knew I was lost. I could not speak, let alone defend myself. I thought what a fool of a girl I had been not to go with Daniel when he would have saved me. What an arrogant child I had been to think that I could weave my way through these plots and not attract notice. Me, with olive skin and dark eyes, and a name like Hannah?

  We came to a paneled door, monstrous with hammered nails. He tapped on it, opened it at a call from within, and walked in, arms tight around me as if we were mismatched lovers.

  The bishop was sitting at a table facing the door; his clerk had his back to the door. A chair was set at a distance facing both table and bishop. The jailor dumped me roughly into it and stood back, closed the door and set himself before it.

  “Name?” the bishop asked wearily.

  “Hannah Verde,” the jailor answered, while I searched for my voice and found it was lost in terror.

  “Age?”

  He reached forward and prodded my shoulder.

  “Seventeen,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Seventeen,” I said, a little louder. I had forgotten the meticulous recordkeeping of the Inquisition, the bureaucracy of terror. First they would take my name, my age, my address, my occupation, the name of my father and my mother, their address, their occupations, the names of my grandparents and their address and occupations, and then, and only then, when they had everything named and labeled, they would torture me until I spilled out everything I knew, everything I could imagine, and everything that I thought they might want to know.

  “Occupation?”

  “Fool to the queen,” I said.

  There was a splashing noise in the room, a childish damp warmth in my breeches, and a shameful stable smell. I had pissed myself for fear. I bowed my head, mortification overlaying my terror.

  The clerk raised his head as if alerted by the warm sharp smell. He turned and observed me. “Oh, I can vouch for this girl,” he said as if it were a matter of very little interest.

  It was John Dee.

  I was beyond recognizing him, beyond wondering how he came to be the bishop’s clerk having been the bishop’s prisoner. I just met his neutral look with the blank eyes of a girl too frightened to think for herself.

  “Can you?” asked the bishop doubtfully.

  John Dee nodded. “She is a holy fool,” he said. “She once saw an angel in Fleet Street.”

  “That must be heretical,” the bishop maintained.

  John Dee considered it for a moment, as if it were not a matter of life and death to me. “No, a true vision I think, and Queen Mary thinks the same. She will not be best pleased when she discovers we have arrested her fool.”

  That gave the bishop pause. I could see him hesitate. “The queen’s orders to me are to root out heresy wherever I find it, in her household, in the streets, and to show no favor. The girl was arrested with a royal warrant.”

  “Oh well, as you wish,” John Dee said negligently.

  I opened my mouth to speak but no words came. I could not believe that he would defend me so halfheartedly. Yet here he was, turning his back to me once more and copying my name into the Inquisition’s ledger.

  “Details,” Bishop Bonner said.

  “Subject was seen to look away at the elevation of the Host on the morning of 27 December,” John Dee read in a clerkly mutter. “Subject asked the queen to show mercy to heretics before the court. Subject is a familiar to Princess Elizabeth. Subject has a knowledge of learning and languages